The beach, the pose, seem familiar from the
initially shocking, now iconic image of the drowned boy Alan Kurdi. But the dead
Syrian toddler is nowhere to be seen. Instead – look! – it’s Ai Weiwei!

Ai’s undoubtedly sincere gesture has been
much mocked: Jonathan
Jones called it a "crass, unthinking selfie". Once again, a celebrity sees
a humanitarian crisis and realises that what the world needs is an image of
himself.

Ai’s own corporate supporters
inadvertently skewer the grandiloquence of the whole misguided enterprise. According to Sandy Angus, co-owner of the India
Art Fair: “It is an iconic image because it is very political, human and
involves an incredibly important artist like Ai Weiwei. The image is haunting
and represents the whole immigration crisis and the hopelessness of the people
who have tried to escape their pasts for a better future.”

But what does this unfortunate collision of "an incredibly important artist" and the "hopelessness of the people" tell us
about the difficulties of looking at refugees?
If Ai is less than successful in representing "the whole immigration
crisis", where does his failure leave the possibility of such a project?

The
performance of empathy

"There is no refugee crisis," Ai has
said, "but only a human crisis". His
artistic
project is "to relate to humanity’s struggles", his Lesvos image a
straightforward attempt to embody this suffering humanity.

Ai has faith in the gesture of empathy as
antidote to the inhumanity of politics. Unfortunately, the gesture of the
empathiser has a tendency to occlude the object of empathy. The performance of
empathy has become something of a cultural trope, from students sleeping out in
support of the homeless to campaigners undertaking the challenge of living on
the financial resources of destitute asylum-seekers. In each case, the position
in all this of the hypothetical recipient of empathy is rather unclear. By
displacing the victim from the visual field, Ai’s image has the virtue of
literalising this problematic.

The other thing that is displaced in the
performance of empathy is politics. Ai’s focus on that great abstraction "humanity" lifts his gaze far above the humdrum political decision-making that
actually cost Alan Kurdi his life. The crisis becomes the existential one of
death, the great sea that awaits us all.

But this is not at all the nature of the 'refugee crisis'. As
has been observed, it is in fact a crisis of values and politics. Crudely,
refugees only get to be a 'crisis' when they start coming 'here', to our world
of privilege. The moment of crisis is a political decision, in this case to
refuse to organise Europe’s ample resources to respond in a coherent and
responsible way to the perfectly manageable flows of refugees and
migrants.

Empathy with humanity can be a way to avoid
this attribution of political responsibility – even European leaders have wept
crocodile tears over the dead, whilst seeking ways to save them by preventing
them from setting out for Europe in the first place.

Ai purveys an empathy that is accessible
and democratic, neutralising political crisis into a (passing) crisis of
feeling: even at a celebrity art gala you can don
an emergency blanket and feel good about yourself. Hard political
questions, of your country’s leaders or yourself, not required.

Looking
at refugees

Part of the difficulty of representing the 'refugee crisis' may lie in the very ubiquity of its representations. This may
be the most photographed humanitarian crisis in history: the tragedies playing
out on Lesvos beaches can be recorded by anyone with a smartphone and a cheap
flight ticket. The very endlessness of images of disaster can numb. The only
limitations on the flood of images are the media taboos on what degree of
horror can be shown. The power of the Alan Kurdi images derive partly from the
decision of Western newspaper editors to allow through these particular images
of a dead child.

This may
be the most photographed humanitarian crisis in history...

Ai seems to be grappling with these difficulties
of representation. He sees the inadequacy of the passive contemplation of yet
more images of refugees. Instead, he goes there, he sets up camp in Lesvos, he
enacts Alan Kurdi’s death. His willingness to engage is praiseworthy. But the
result is bad art, in that we just end up with another glossy image to
contemplate, the helplessness of the refugee victim doubled in the helplessness
of the artist.

In its very failures, Ai’s work points
obliquely to the key political content of the 'crisis': the collapsing of
distinctions between the 'here' of comfortable Western lives and the 'there' of
humanitarian catastrophe and war. This disruption of our beaches and Eurostar
journeys is immensely unsettling, and goes to the heart of the political construction
of Europe itself. Apparently hardened war correspondents found working on the
Greek islands unexpectedly
traumatic, as being 'here' in Europe prevented them from putting in place
the usual psychological defence mechanisms.

This struggle over the shifting space of
globalisation is key to the politics of the 'refugee crisis', just as it is to
Trump’s projected wall. The European 'here' must be protected from the alien 'there', if necessary by militarising the Aegean and turning Greece into a vast
borderland of camps.

Images cannot capture this respatialisation
of our political geography, as they are always already locationless and
floating. They can register disjunctures (tourists sunning themselves as boats
arrive), but they cannot move past this shock reaction to articulate where we
are when 'here' and 'there' collide.

One of the places we end up is nowhere –
the non-places of the refugee camps documented by Richard
Mosse in the sublime black-and-white of his heat-seeking military cameras. Mosse’s
extraordinarily beautiful panoramic hells have undeniable power, and relish the
uncomfortable irony of redeploying cutting edge military gadgetry to aesthetic
ends. But they arguably do not go beyond registering this nowhere as
military-industrial sublime to the more difficult questions of our relationship
to these non-places.

Representing
here, there and nowhere

If our predicament is to be lost in these
disjunctures and nowheres, contemporary art is in general poorly equipped for
any project of spatial reorientation. The art world is itself a globalised
nowhere, with the same elite artists exhibiting in similar galleries around the
world. Indeed, the Ai beach photo was produced for a feature in an Indian art
magazine.

The art world is itself a globalised
nowhere...

By contrast, the most powerful and exciting
document of the 'crisis' that I have seen is not the work of an artist. It is a
simple sketch map, posted on Facebook by an anonymous Iraqi and disseminated by
journalist Ghaith
Abdul-Ahad. In a few sweeping arrows, prices in various currencies and cartoonish
boats and buses, it describes how you get from the Turkish coast to destination
Germany (signified by flag-waving stick man). Its exuberance conveys that
extraordinary period in 2015 when migrants themselves were actively refiguring
Europe’s political geography, on foot, communally, in great numbers. Critically,
it sees ‘here’ from ‘there’, it is a tool for action rather than an object of
contemplation – and the migrant is doing the seeing.

Drawing by Iraqi migrant. Disseminated by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad.I don’t mean to claim that only refugees
themselves can represent this crisis, and that artists can have no role (which
would be particularly unfair on Ai, given his own experience of political
persecution). But this map may be a clue to the kinds of approaches that could
be productive in grappling with our current disorientations. If the old
hierarchical spatial configurations are no longer sustainable, or are only
sustainable with the violence of walls and razor wire, then there is a role for
art to set out alternative ways of mapping our predicament.

Last week, I was sitting in a conference
room at a workshop for experienced NGO leaders by the Freed Voices group of
experts-by-experience of immigration detention. The format should have been
familiar: stories of personal experiences of detention that will inform our
work as we return to ‘our’ space of advocacy. Instead, within seconds I have my
eyes shut and am instructed to think of an experience of trusting someone. Then,
we are writing our questions on the walls – and the migrants have barely spoken
yet, beyond a sparse few instructions. Later, they are staging media interviews
between themselves, no (white European) interviewer in sight.

The Freed Voices (who are campaigners
rather than artists) specialise in these disruptive spatial interventions. They
have previously produced maps of the UK’s detention centres, non-places devoid
of maps for security reasons, according to the experiences and emotional
associations of the different rooms and wings. The Freed Voices are resolutely here,
not images in someone’s art project but living amongst us with (mostly)
irregular immigration status, liable to be redetained at any time. Telling us
to shut our eyes and think of our childhoods.

This article is part of the seriesForced Migration and the Humanities. This
dialogue is an editorial partnership with openDemocracy 50.50 led by Mariangela
Palladino (Keele University) and Agnes Woolley (Royal Holloway University of
London).

About the author

Jerome Phelps is the Director of Detention Action, where he has worked with migrants in immigration detention since 2003. Detention Action is a national charity that supports people in immigration detention and campaigns for changes to detention policy. Jerome has written or co-written four reports on detention, includingPoint of No Return: the futile detention of unreturnable migrants(2014). Follow Detention Action on Twitter: @DetentionAction

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
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